Predictors for loyalty of visitors to the city of Thessaloniki as a tourist destination : a multinomial logistic regression based on a sample survey

Abstract

In today’s competitive and globalized environment and in the midst of economic crisis, it is imperative for the Tourism Authorities to investigate thoroughly the factors that influence tourism visitors of the different cities of a country to visit repeatedly their destinations and to form a strong loyalty to them . The aim of this paper is the investigation of factors which contribute to the loyalty of tourists travelling to the Greek City of Thessaloniki. A random sample of (1000 ) tourism visitors was surveyed for their impressions from Thessaloniki and their loyalty to this tourism destination. An Exploratory Factor Analysis has revealed two factors “history of Greece and Thessaloniki” and ”natural beauty of Greece and Thessaloniki”. These factors constitute a factor named “Image of Greece”. Multinomial Logistic Regression was applied with dependent variable “favour or not of a second visit to Thessaloniki’ and dependent variables “image of Thessaloniki with respect to natural beauty and security”, “annual income of visitor” and “age of visitor”. From the Analysis of the model, it was concluded that the three independent variables are statistically significant predictors of loyalty of the tourists to the destination of Thessaloniki, at the level of significance α=0,05. The authors argue that ,due to the proximity of Thessaloniki to the Holy Mountain of Chalkidiki with the famous monasteries,the attractive scenery of the Coastline and the Strategic position in the Balkans, the CONFERENCE ,the RELIGIOUS TOURISM and the SUN-SEA tourism could be the three forms of tourism which could establish Thessaloniki as an International Centre of high quality Tourism .